We made a weekend trip from Finland to Wings over Europe event in the north France to visit a bit bigger venue than our local events. Also wanted to see Jase Dussia flying live. No personal flying though, as we flew to Brussels and just took car rental to get to the Maubeuge airfield and couldn't carry any planes with us.

We arrived Friday evening just to catch some of the last demos and spent Saturday on the site. On Saturday the weather was rainy, but I think that helped Aerobertics sales as people kept drooling at the display planes and fortunately the weather allowed key demos to be flown.

Finnish Aerobatics Championships were held this year at Malmi airport in Helsinki. And as it was pretty close to us we went to watch the Advanced class with my son for some time. Actually I haven't ever before seen real aerobatic flying in competition.There was also gathering of US muscle cars & sports cars at the same time.

Malmi airport was first airport in Helsinki, but now the city is trying to claim its land for building houses, despite the old airport buildings having historical value and the airport being the only place near Helsinki supporting flying training and recreational flying.

Back at first round of the national championships for the third time. I still competed in sport class as honestly I haven't had time to start learning more difficult programs and I still don't have a plane that would suit them. My 95" 3DHS Extra is great flying plane, but due to it's size and 12S battery it's not suited for higher classes (2m and 10S limitation).

Probably the most interesting thing was that Lassi Nurila was using his new plane in the competition. Lassi has been designing and building this plane through the winter and based on what I heard it will enter some kind of production (meaning it will be available for purchase!). When compared to Sebastiano Silvestri's three plane and Gernot's Pandora I prefer Lassi's plane streamlined look.

Lassi is still fine tuning the setup, so it's very interesting to see how this season and big competitions in Europe will go for him.

The flying season has been officially started: on 19.4. I visited Piikajärvi Airfield and we had quite nice turnout of aerobatic planes. I got my 95" Extra dusted off with seven flights. The weather was pretty windy, but that seems to be the norm when more people gather together. Some pretty interesting planes were also present.

During our winter holiday I visited Finnish Air Force Museum in Tikkakoski (central Finland) with my son after several years. This place is worth the visit as the planes are well displayed and there's some unique planes, too.

I started to drool at 3DHS 95" Extra 330SC as soon as first info of it surfaced on Internet. And I basically ordered one as soon as they were available in Europe.

The first items I received were motor & prop. On this build I went with Dualsky GA6000.8 motor and got carbon fiber 24x10 prop (electric, lightened) and matching spinner from Meijzlik. I will use my existing Savox 1270 servos the plane. Couple of them have seen a bit of use, but basically there are as new.

The plane arrived quickly and without shipping damage, everything was really well packaged. Upon unpacking I immediately noticed that the quality of the finish on this plane is top notch.

The plane assembly went without trouble, let the pictures speak for themselves....Continue Reading

Just enjoying nice summer evening with my Extreme Flight 70" Extra 300 EXP. Video footage taken from different perspectives during 2017 on several flights, but I managed only now to compile it into a full video. This is nothing extra special, but haven't seen too many onboard videos from aerobatics planes lately.

May has been exceptionally warm here in Finland and that has meant good flying opportunities for hobbyist. During weekend I visited Piikajärvi airfield where local flying club was spending their bootcamp. The location turned out to be great, there was plenty of space for both full size airplane / sailplane activity and RC flying. They also had nice club house etc. The place is certainly worth visiting again!

I flew my new Extreme Flight / 3DHS 95" Extra 330SC and old 70" Extra EXP there. Weather was somewhat gusty, but bigger planes didn't seem to be too much affected by it.

Once again I needed myself a winter / spring project. This time I found an abused Electrify Ultimate 3D bipe. This is a quite small and old bird. Due to small size I felt it's quite fine practice project for both wood repair & covering job.

Covering on the bird was in really bad shape and the plane had seen some flight damage. Maybe stuck in tree or something like that. Cowl is a bit busted and both wings / ailerons have some damage. Also fuse has cracked wood here and there.

My plan is to strip all covering off, fix the structural faults and then cover the plane with a new scheme. The challenge here is mostly caused by the fact that top wing is glued and not easily removable, I'll need to do some heavy hacking to get it off. The cowl will also need some fiber glassing, spackling and painting. Fortunately the canopy is in good shape.

The plane came with motor and servos, but without ESC. Servos are Futaba S3114s while motor is Rimfire 35-30 1250kV. I plan to test the servos thoroughly and use them if they work. Maybe just switch a stronger & newer servo for elevator.

This will be a bit slow repair as I'm not in a hurry with it and have some other projects ongoing, too.

I'm way overtime with this. My total flight time actually decreased from 2016 quite a lot, but I concentrated better to couple of planes and actually got more flight time with them. Also now the majority of flying was made with larger planes. They stand wind better and you can get more easily flying time as you don't need to nail every occasion when there's low wind. The spring was good from weather perspective and I got a lot of flights. However, the end of the year saw lousy weather and I didn't manage to do too much flying.

I participated two rounds of our national F3A Sport class and won both. And as there was only three rounds I ended up being also F3A Sport class cup championship. The sport program is really easy to fly, but it was good training to get used to competition pressure. Also the wind on both rounds was quite strong & gusty and this gave me advantage as I was flying the biggest plane in the sport class.

The lousy weather during last two months have kept me grounded more than I would have hoped. However, I have been able to catch flight here and there. Seems like my 70" birds are almost the only ones I fly at the moment. I've also sold many of the other planes and I'm hoping to get a new bigger bird, but let's leave that to later....

I managed to participate also the second round of Finnish championships league. Surprisingly the weather was again sunny, only the wind was a bit gusty causing challenging landing conditions for several competitors.

Several of the competitors also continued directly to Nordic F3A championships held in Denmark (Lassi won the championship).

This is not strictly model related, but I'm pretty sure this will interest plenty of model aviators & ship builders.

Finland is celebrating its 100 years of independence this year and special air show was organized in Helsinki, capital of Finland. Special in that sense, that the air show was located in sea area just south of centre of Helsinki and also because the attending planes were a bit special. It's not common to see this many different fighters & aerobatic groups in Finland.

Also part of the reason is that Finland has started a process to select new fighters to replace it's legacy Hornets and all the manufacturers are very eager to show their offering.

I participated my first competition in sport class of F3A Finnish championships league. The competition was held in Espoo, southern Finland. The weather was exceptionally good, which seems quite rare for any local model competition.

The Finnish F3A FAI class hosts some world class pilots. Lassi Nurila won 2016 F3A World Cup and Janne Lappi placed 2nd in 2017 F3P World Championships (indoor). These guys are virtually on the same level with legends like Gernot and CPLR. Lassi is also building the Sensation biplanes the guys are flying - and makes own carbon fiber propellers, which are really work of art.

Despite flying 3D / freestyle plane instead of a proper F3A plane I managed to win the sport class. It really wasn't my best flying, but at least it seems that the winter / spring training paid off. And kudos to Extreme Flight for building really wonderfully flying plane(s)!

As a competition this was really educating. I competed myself, wrote down FAI class scores for one the judges and also read notes to several competitors in both sport & nordic classes.

Raku RC club had their annual spring "bootcamp" again at Jämijärvi. Weather was nice, although windy, especially on Saturday. Still we saw all kind of flying gadgets from quad copters and helicopters to turbine jets. I took my EF 70" Extra EXP and Pilot 87" Yak-54 there and flew plenty with both. And this time I didn't have any technical problems or accidents!

One more Model Expo visited. Brought three planes to our club stand: 3D printed Spitfire, Extreme Flight 48" Yak 54 EXP and indoor Extra. I also flew dozen of demo flights with the Extra in the indoor flight arena.

I was very happy with our club stand, we had plenty of different kind of planes for display there. Also simulator was available for visitors / interested people to test. The fair itself is getting smaller and smaller. I guess it's just too expensive for hobby stores to attend, which is a real pity. Raku actually was also the only flying club dedicated mostly to aeroplanes attending.

As a winter project I built a Messerschmitt BF-110 twin motor heavy fighter. This is a rather small model with wingspan around 85cm / 34". The size was more or less determined by the extra electronics I had laying around. The plan / 3 views were fetched from Outerzone and the materials for the plane were all kind of scrap I could find from my house. So this was really build on a budget.

The plane is now waiting for maiden. I'm really interested to see how it flies and what kind of flight envelope it has. The plane might see some fun combat action in future...

I managed to rip elevator off my Sebart Katana S 50E when doing a harrier landing on a field with lot of snow / slush. The counter balances just dug into the slush and all CA hinges were cleanly broken from the middle. The elevator joiner also come partially loose when elevator sides bend backwards. I also think that cold weather made the CA hinges more prone to breaking and this plane is quite old (I got it 2nd hand) so from that perspective it might have been time to replace hinges.